Voices of War coming soon

For a little over a year, I’ve been working on a documentary on war veterans and I’m excited to say it’s just about ready for primetime. The documentary project will be in two parts: a semi-traditional documentary and a companion book.

All together, I logged more than 2000 miles and captured nearly 50 hours of interviews from 48 veterans. Two of the interviews are incomplete so I won’t be able to include those two veterans in the project, but the other 46 will be in the book, the documentary or both.

I call it a semi-traditional documentary for two reasons. In a more traditional documentary, I would have picked a veteran from each major conflict and weaved a single story from those six stories. Instead, I chose to take individual comments and stories from most of the veterans I interviewed and combined them into a single piece. In all, there are 36 individual voices in the documentary. They cover every major conflict and some of the smaller conflicts and peace-keeping missions like Kosovo, Somalia,Grenada and Haiti.

The second way this project is different from a traditional documentary is a focus on the voices themselves. I didn’t shoot video of the veterans being interviewed. Instead, I used an audio recorder and then captured a portrait of each person. The advantage to an audio documentary is people typically find an audio recorder less intimidating and they are less self-conscious than with a video. I wanted the veterans I interviewed to be relaxed and to forget about the recorder completely. I also wanted the viewer to focus on the words and the stories and less on the expressions and mannerism of each veteran. The documentary will include the photograph of the individual veteran as he or she speaks, but it won’t be moving images.

The stories cover a number of different topics including their reason for enlisting, emotions of leaving for war, losing friends, getting wounded and the comradery that comes with serving.

I will release the documentary in time for Memorial Day this year. I am planning a live premiere along with a web page. The book, to be called Common Valor, will be available at the same time. Stay tuned for more details as I lock everything down.

I’ve posted excerpts of several different veterans speaking on this blog. You can see several of them:

Rest in Peace, Eugene Lusk

Medal of Honor

Common Valor

Say Thank You to a Veteran